finds all files on the system matching the given pattern (or all
of the patterns if multiple are given). It does this by means of
an index made by
-.BR plocate-build (8),
-which in turn reads the database made by
-.BR updatedb (8).
+.BR updatedb (8)
+or (less commonly) converted from another index by
+.BR plocate\-build (8).
-plocate is largely compatible with
+plocate is largely argument-compatible with
.BR mlocate (1),
-and reuses its database to create its index, but is significantly
+but is significantly
faster. In particular, it rarely needs to scan through its entire
database, unless the pattern is very short (less than three bytes)
or you want to search for a regular expression. It does not try to
of them. This is the main incompatibility with
.BR mlocate (1),
which searches for files that match one or more patterns, unless
-the \-a option is given.
+the \-A option is given.
By default, patterns are taken to be substrings to search for.
If at least one non-escaped globbing metacharacter (*, ? or []) is given,
that pattern is instead taken to be a glob pattern (which means it needs
to start and end in * for a substring match). If
-.B --regexp
+.B \-\-regexp
is given, patterns are instead taken to be (non-anchored) POSIX basic
regular expressions, and if
-.B --regex
+.B \-\-regex
is given, patterns are taken to be POSIX extended regular expressions.
All of this matches
.BR mlocate (1)
bit set to access the index (which is built as root), but by
testing visibility as the calling user.
+.SH EXIT STATUS
+.B plocate
+exits with 0 to indicate that a match was found or that
+.B \-\-help
+or
+.B \-\-version
+were passed. Otherwise,
+.B plocate
+exits with status code 1, indicating that an error occurred or that no matches were found.
+
.SH OPTIONS
+.TP
+\fB\-A\fR, \fB\-\-all\fR
+Ignored for compatibility with
+.BR mlocate (1).
+
.TP
\fB\-b\fR, \fB\-\-basename\fR
Match only against the file name portion of the path name,
.B plocate
will escape special characters in filenames, so that they are safe for
consumption by typical shells (similar to the GNU coreutils
-.I shell-escape-always
+.I shell\-escape\-always
quoting style), unless printing to a pipe, but this options will
turn off such quoting.
.TP
\fB\-w\fR, \fB\-\-wholename\fR
Match against the entire path name. This is the default,
-so unless \fB-b\fR is given first (see above), it will not do
+so unless \fB\-b\fR is given first (see above), it will not do
anything. This option thus exists only as compatibility with
.BR mlocate (1).
Steinar H. Gunderson <steinar+plocate@gunderson.no>
.SH SEE ALSO
-\fBplocate-build\fP(8),
+\fBplocate\-build\fP(8),
\fBmlocate\fP(1),
\fBupdatedb\fP(8)